ALES Research Centres & Facilities

Agricultural

Agri-Food Discovery Place
Bio-products pilot processing plant supporting research and innovation in meat safety, agricultural-industrial technologies, precision fermentation, and functional foods and ingredients.

Alberta Centre for Sustainable Rural Communities
The Alberta Centre for Sustainable Rural Communities assists rural communities in meeting diverse challenges through fostering constructive dialogue, promoting interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and developing partnerships.

Breton Plots
The only continuous long-term plots on Gray Luvisols, a dominant forest soil in Canada's Boreal Forest Zone. Long-term experiments at this site assess the interaction between crop rotation, fertilization, crop productivity, soil health and soil processes. 

South Campus
Agricultural research and teaching facilities that specialize in crops, dairy, poultry and swine.

Dairy Research and Technology Centre
Home to about 150 Holstein cows in a 350-foot barn with 146 tie stalls, this centre supports research on optimizing production efficiency and sustainability, enhancing the nutritional quality of milk and value-added processing, and enriching and extracting milk components that are beneficial to human health. It is also used to teach dairy nutrition, digestive physiology, production management and milk dairy processing, and is involved in technology transfer with stakeholders.

Poultry Research Centre
The facility supports research and learning in bioeconomic modelling, metabolism and reproduction, nutrition, management and physiology, embryology and value-added meat product development.

Mattheis Research Ranch
5,000-hectare prairie grassland research ranch which boasts a rich variety of plant life, a diversity of ecosystems, habitats and riparian areas, and several wetlands.

Roy Berg Kinsella Research Station
5,000-hectare beef cattle breeding facility in the Aspen Parkland and home to research on bovine genomics and the complexities of interactions between animals and the environment.

St. Albert Research Station
An 800-acre facility which supports a wide range of crop research.

Swine Research Technology Centre (SRTC)
The SRTC supports research and teaching in nutrition and metabolism, feeds and feedstuff utilization, reproduction and breeding herd management, functional genomics, metabolomics and value-added product development.

Natural Resources Analytical Laboratory (NRAL)
This site is a fee for service research laboratory, with services including elemental analyses of soil, plant, biological material, greenhouse gas and water samples available to U of A researchers, researchers from other universities, government organizations and industry.

Environmental

Crossley Forest
The Crossley Forest is a 65-hectare area established in 1951 to study the management of lodgepole pine, and is located near Strachan, Alberta in the Rocky Mountain District.

EMEND
The EMEND Project, located in the boreal mixedwood forest 90 km northwest of Peace River, Alberta, is a large-scale variable retention harvest experiment designed to test the effects of residual forest structure on ecosystem integrity and forest regeneration at the forest stand level.

George Lake
The George Lake research site, located one hour northwest of Edmonton is used for studying forest and aquatic ecosystems. There are many ponds around the site, which is surrounded by an aspen-dominated forest.

Rose Creek Education Forest
Located in the Rocky Clearwater forest area, about 130 km southwest of Edmonton, the Rose Creek Education Forest spans 19,000 hectares and is dominated by coniferous species.

Woodbend Forest
A 160-acre block located near Devon, about 15 minutes southwest of Edmonton, the Woodbend Forest consists of low sandy ridges covered by aspen, white spruce, jack pine and is interspersed by bogs and marshes.

Textiles